Profiling Tools

We’ve been addressing a performance problem with a page in our application. The page displays header information and rows of detail information. Typically, there aren’t too many rows of detail information, but in some cases there are many, many rows of details.

We’ve been using the Amakihi performance measuring approach on our project. This has been great so far in identifying a surprising performance problem with this page. My initial guess with a performance problem like this is that one of our DAO layer calls would have been very inefficient. However, the Amakihi performance log pointed to the web layer. So instead of tweaking the data access, we’re looking at tweaking our HTML rendering framework.

Now that we’ve identified the layer in which our problem appears, we want to continue to profile and optimize our HTML framework. I’ll be spending some time looking at profiling tools that give a more granular breakdown of the performance.

A couple of years ago I liked the look of JFluid. Unfortunately, Sun is now “productizing” it, meaning that they’re rolling it into NetBeans.